فصل 18

eighteen

I followed Shazad out of the pavilion, blinded again by the golden light and bright colors. “How did she do that?” I asked as I caught up with her, glancing back at Imin. “Is she . . . That’s not a Skinwalker, is it?”

“No, amazingly we don’t all want to be murdered in our sleep. Imin is a Demdji, like Delila,” Shazad said, as if that were an answer. She tossed open the flap to a tent that was smaller than the prince’s but tall enough to stand in. It was organized with exacting precision: a neatly made bed, a stack of books, a trunk, and a line of weapons on the ground. Shazad flung open the trunk. “Here.” She pulled out a plain white shirt and a brown shalvar. “These ought to fit you. You’re covered in blood.”

“What’s a Demdji?” I asked, figuring a second too late I ought to have said thank you.

“You’ve never heard of Demdji?” She let the trunk fall shut.

“I was born a long way from you.” Somewhere where princes and shape-shifting women lived only in stories told round campfires.

“Children born of Djinn and mortal women.” Shazad sat herself on the trunk. “There are a dozen or so in camp. Ahmed practically collects them now.”

“Can they all change their shape?” The wound in my arm twinged at the memory of the Skinwalker in the canyon. I pulled off my blood-soaked shirt.

“No, it depends,” Shazad explained. “Djinn are things of the desert, naturals at illusion and manipulation. So that’s what their children inherit: illusions, deceit, power from desert heat and winds. Delila can create images that look real but are empty to the touch, all air. Imin can change her—or his, depending on the day—shape to look like anyone. There’s a pair of twins who change shape, too, only instead of changing into people, they become animals. Another one crawls inside your mind and twists until you see what she wants you to, like sun madness. In the holy texts they call it the Djinni’s gift. Some say it’s a protection to balance out the Djinni’s mark.”

“The mark?” I felt ignorant as she talked on about all these things like I should understand them.

“Imin’s golden eyes, Delila’s purple hair.” Shazad scraped her own dark hair off her face. “Some of them can get away as human in the great wide world. When we were still in Izman, Delila used to hide her hair with dark henna, or she’d cast an illusion over it. But then there are the ones who can’t hide.” The ones who got bullets to the heads. “The Gallan will kill them because they think all First Beings are against their invented god.”

I remembered the girl from the Gallan camp. I’d thought it was blood in her hair. It might’ve just been that it was red. The Djinni’s mark.

“Half of Miraji would go after them to get something from them. Like a finger, for it’s supposed healing powers. Ask Bahi if you want theology. Most folks would call it—”

“Desert magic.” So this really was where the stories came to life. Heroes and monsters come to fight and die for the Rebel Prince.

Jin and I had talked about those stories. About the Rebel Prince. And then Jin had lied to me until I was just some silly girl barging into something I couldn’t begin to be prepared for.

• • •

SHAZAD WAS ABOUT my size. Except a lifetime of eating proper meals made her more filled out in all the areas that helped me look like a boy when I needed to. I tugged at the clothes she’d loaned me uncomfortably as I crossed the camp, trying to retrace my steps from that morning.

I met Bahi just outside the tent with the canopy of stars where I’d woken up. He was ducking out. He caught me tugging at the chest of the shirt, wet hair dripping down my back, making it stick to me. Shazad had showed me where I could wash, a small pool shielded from view of the camp, before leaving me to do . . . whatever it was she did here. I had nowhere else to go and nothing else I was meant to be doing.

“Why’re you wearing Shazad’s clothes?” Bahi asked, looking me over.

“Why do you know Shazad’s clothes on sight?” I countered without thinking.

Bahi scratched the back of his neck, pulling a face. He looked like a kid caught doing something wrong. “She’s sort of hard not to look at,” he admitted. “Don’t tell her I said that. I’m fairly sure she knows about five different ways to kill me without actually having to touch me. And if I’m dead there’ll be no one to take care of your prince.”

“He’s not mine,” I said defensively. And then, because I couldn’t help it, “How is he?”

“You got him here in time.” Bahi ran the hand with the tattoo on it through his hair. “Now we just have to wait.”

“Can I see him?”

“I don’t see why not.” Bahi shrugged, gesturing behind himself.

The heat hit me like a wall as soon as I pulled back the tent flap. Jin was lying as I’d left him, still as the dead.

Only his brother sat next to him. Prince Ahmed’s shirt was loose at the collar, and I could see the echo of Jin’s sun tattooed on his own chest in the dim light from the lamp. He looked up at the sound of the tent flap falling shut behind me. “Your Majesty.” The words tripped out, unnatural. “I’m sorry, I should—”

“No, please, stay.” I stopped my retreat. I wasn’t sure how to refuse a prince. I sat down across from Ahmed on the other side.

I stilled. Ahmed brought the present rushing back in. Jin wasn’t just some foreign boy with a traitor smile; he was the Sultan’s son and I was far out of my place sitting with this pair of prodigal princes.

“Is Jin even his real name?” I asked when the silence had stretched too long.

“Yes,” Ahmed said. “But it’s not his full name. Our father named him Ajinahd Al’Oman Bin Izman. Lien, his mother, was the one who nicknamed him Jin.”

Nearly two months and he hadn’t even told me his real name.

Ahmed was watching me. “You think he doesn’t trust you. But that’s not true.”

I scoffed.

“The compass.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the battered brass thing in his hands. I thought of the tattoo on Jin’s back. The compass. On the other side of the sun. Like his heart beat between the two. “It’s of Gamanix make. While the Albish and the Gallan war over magic and mortality, the Gamanix balance the two. A little bit of science, a little bit of magic. Each compass is twinned with another. That compass is our lifeline. In the six years since we got them, I’ve never let mine out of my sight. I would have lost Jin a dozen times if not for this. My brother may have little regard for his own safety, but if he trusted you with his family, there’s no way he could trust you more.

“It was Jin’s mother who got us out of the palace alive, you know.” I didn’t know that. Just like I didn’t really know anything real about Jin. But he didn’t seem to need me to answer him. I wasn’t even sure he was talking to me. “Lien and my mother were like sisters. They came into my father’s harem near the same time, and Jin and I were born hours apart. I was early and Jin was late. I was fifth of my father’s sons. He was sixth. We were born early enough in our father’s reign that we were treated well, but not so early that he took more notice of us than our mothers liked. Lien called it fate. Jin doesn’t believe in fate.

“I don’t have a single memory of my mother’s face. I was too young when she died.” The Sultan’s pretty young wife from the story. The one who was beaten to death for giving birth to Delila. She’d been a few words in the tale of the Rebel Prince to me. But she’d been flesh and blood to Ahmed. “All my memories of Miraji are of my brother. The night Delila was born, Jin was sick. Lien and my mother had been planning an escape ever since my mother learned she was carrying a Djinni’s child. It wasn’t safe to move Jin—he was running a fever—but it wasn’t safe for Delila to stay. So Lien had to risk it. I remember little bits from that night. Clinging to Lien’s skirts while she peeled off a sultan’s ransom in gold bracelets to pay for a ship to Xicha.

“But those things belong to a dream. What I remember better than anything is sitting on a bunk with my hand on my brother’s heartbeat as he burned up on an unsteady ship taking us away from home and Lien making me pray for Jin to make it through the night alive while she rocked my sister to try to stop her screaming.” He swallowed, his throat bobbing. “I’ve lost count of how many prayers I’ve sent up for my brother to keep him alive since then. He has had more than his share of brushes with death for one life.”

“Some folks are just better at putting themselves in the line of fire,” I said. “Your Majesty.”

“Please, call me Ahmed. All you need to do is look around to see that my majesty is very much in question.” He looked nothing like his brother in that moment. Jin always smiled at me like we were both about to be in big trouble and he loved it. The prince smiled like he was forgiving you for it. “My brother may have little regard for his own safety, but most of the time, when he’s stepped into the line of fire, it’s been to put himself between death and Delila or me. I’ve never seen him flirt so carelessly with death for anyone other than us before. Until you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I focused on Jin instead of the Rebel Prince. His foreign features were the one familiar thing in this uncanny place full of purple-haired princesses and golden-eyed shape-shifters, even though he might as well have become a stranger all over again the moment Ahmed called him brother.

“Winning your throne, your kingdom . . .” I began. “Is it worth all these people dying?” Is it worth his life? “The Sultan killed your mother, the Sultim stole your throne—that’s nothing to do with anyone else. You want to know who killed my mother? Your country.” I didn’t mean it to come out sounding like a taunt. But I wanted to hear him say it. That he really can save this desert.

“I’m not here for power.” Prince Ahmed was calm, as if I hadn’t just thrown his mother’s murder in his face. Somehow it didn’t come out cocky. “I’ve seen the way my father rules like a man afraid to lose even a scrap of his power to another. He thinks that’s the only way, and that’s why we are poor and occupied and weak. I never planned to come back to Miraji to take my father’s seat.

“We went everywhere before coming here. We saw the Ionian Peninsula, where they have a council of men and women, chosen from among their people, poor and rich alike, so that they can be heard equally. We went to Amonpour, where their trade and their industry make them wealthy and full instead of poor and starving. We went to Albis, where women can inherit land and hold jobs and are treated as equal to men in all things. And Espa, where on one particular drunken evening we thought doing this”—the prince pulled aside his collar so I could see the whole of his sun tattoo, identical to Jin’s—“was a good idea. It’s a Xichian symbol for luck and fortune. Appropriate when you’re living job to job, ship to ship, like we were then. I didn’t exactly plan on it becoming the symbol for a whole revolution.

“The people of this desert should have a country that belongs to them, not to one man. Everybody in this country lives like they’re lit with fire at birth. There’s so much greatness in Miraji, and so many terrible things being done by my father and by the Gallan. This country’s people deserve better. Shazad deserves a country where her mind isn’t wasted because she’s a woman. The Demdji shouldn’t fear for their lives just because my father has allied with a country that burns those touched with magic. My mother deserved better than being beaten to death for rebelling against a life she didn’t choose for herself. We could make Miraji the greatest country in the world.

“My father made it the way it is, a warring, violent place, half in the hands of the Gallan king. And my brother Kadir is like him. With him as Sultim, we will keep living under foreign empires who come in and bleed the sands dry. Or we could change everything.”

Prince Ahmed’s face came alive when he was talking about the desert. And the more he talked, the harder it was not to believe him. I finally understood the crazy kid in the pistol pit the night I met Jin. That these ideas could make men shout for rebellion even when it meant they would hang for it.